MoonPay has launched the Open Wallet Standard, an open-source framework enabling AI agents to transact across blockchains without exposing private keys.
The standard is available on GitHub, npm, and PyPI under an MIT licence, with contributions from more than 15 organisations, including PayPal, Circle, OKX, Ripple, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Solana Foundation.
The Open Wallet Standard emerged from MoonPay's own product development. In February 2026, the US-based company launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer enabling AI agents to access wallets and transact autonomously via the MoonPay CLI, with support for the x402 payment protocol and multiple blockchain networks. Earlier in March 2026, MoonPay integrated Ledger hardware signing into the agent stack.
In building that infrastructure, MoonPay identified a structural gap: no shared standard existed for how AI agents interact with wallets. Key management was handled differently by each framework, signing logic was rebuilt for every integration, and wallets created for one agent could not be used by another. In addition, private keys were frequently stored in environment variables or plaintext configuration files, with no common security model or portability between systems.
MoonPay generalised the wallet infrastructure behind its Agents product across chains and runtimes, and released the result as the Open Wallet Standard.
Filling a gap in the agentic payments stack
Several machine payment protocols have emerged in recent months. Coinbase and Cloudflare developed x402 for HTTP-native stablecoin payments. Google launched Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with more than 60 partners for agent-driven commerce. Stripe and Tempo released the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for session-based micropayments. The Ethereum Foundation's ERC-8004 established on-chain identity registries for trustless agents.
Each of these protocols assumes that the agent already holds a wallet. None specifies where the wallet resides, how keys are stored, or how one agent locates a wallet created by another. Without a common wallet layer, funds used across multiple agent tools remain fragmented and inaccessible from a single interface. OWS addresses this by providing one encrypted local vault, a single signing interface covering eight blockchain families and a policy engine that enforces spending limits, contract allowlists, and time-bound authorisations before any key is accessed.
Private keys are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM, decrypted only to produce a signature, and wiped from memory immediately afterwards. The key is never accessible to the agent process, the language model context, or any parent application.
Architecture and adoption
The standard is modular, comprising seven sub-specifications covering storage, signing, policies, agent access, key isolation, wallet lifecycle, and supported chains. Each module can be adopted independently, with no proprietary formats or external dependencies. The standard supports import from MetaMask and export to any compatible wallet.
Native SDK bindings are available for Node.js and Python, alongside a CLI and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server interface, allowing agents built on platforms such as LangChain or any MCP-compatible framework to access wallets through their native tool systems. The wallet vault operates locally, with no cloud accounts or remote key management required.
An open skills marketplace accompanies the release, where developers can publish wallet-compatible capabilities including signing plugins, compliance modules, and chain adapters.
